MS monoply in colleges (and business)

[azebuski]

I just wanted some thoughts on this subject. As a college student I am being FORCED to use MS Office for most of my work, for silly reasons. I do have Windows XP and MS Office running fine in virtualbox, but I love Linux and prefer not to use any MS software.

ALL of my papers could be written in OpenOffice Writer and saved in XML format. Yet my school requires the title pages of all documents be in MS Office WordArt format. What? My name, the date, and the title of the paper HAS to be created in Word Art, with specific font shapes, font colors, etc!

If I write a great paper that deserves an 'A' or if I write a really lousy paper that deserves an 'F', I'll get in trouble either way because my title page was not in MS Word Art format with the gradient of the color shading not applied at the proper angle or the title of my document was not tilted at the proper angle. Huh? What does learning the specifics of MS Office have anything to do with education?

[-grubby]

So they don't accept plain .doc files? That's very messed up.

[Saint Angeles]

holy crap... i've heard of teachers requesting stupid things (like one teacher who INSISTED all the papers be written in comic sans)... but this is absolutely insane!

not only do i disagree with forcing students to use a proprietary software for easy tasks such as word processing, but word art? thats gotta be the cheesiest looking effect ever created.

i haven't used word art since i was 12 years old using Windows 98 SE. that was before i had an internet connection or photoshop and before i knew about linux and GIMP.

[rabbit251]

Wow... that's really strange and unfortunate, I'm not gonna lie. My university keeps a few Linux boxes in every computer lab, but most people are scared of them.

[zeex]

I just wanted some thoughts on this subject. As a college student I am being FORCED to use MS Office for most of my work, for silly reasons. I do have Windows XP and MS Office running fine in virtualbox, but I love Linux and prefer not to use any MS software.

ALL of my papers could be written in OpenOffice Writer and saved in XML format. Yet my school requires the title pages of all documents be in MS Office WordArt format. What? My name, the date, and the title of the paper HAS to be created in Word Art, with specific font shapes, font colors, etc!

If I write a great paper that deserves an 'A' or if I write a really lousy paper that deserves an 'F', I'll get in trouble either way because my title page was not in MS Word Art format with the gradient of the color shading not applied at the proper angle or the title of my document was not tilted at the proper angle. Huh? What does learning the specifics of MS Office have anything to do with education?

Beware teachers are on MicroSoft's payroll :P

[dspari1]

I have Office 2007 installed with Wine. Everything seems to work except clipart.